We are working on a theme called Aurelius so we need to make some adjustments to the BLANK theme code to show that. Copy the BLANK theme in the theme folder and rename it to AureliusWP. If we create a copy of the BLANK theme, then if something gets really screwed up, then we can reset it back if need be.

Once logged in, you should see the WordPress dashboard. Click on Appearances, then on Themes, and activate the theme called AureliusWP. This is our theme and the one we will be working on.

Other maintainence changes you should make are to some of the settings:

Click on Settings, then General and update the Timezone value to your current time zone and the Week starts on value, I usually use Sunday as the starting day of thw week, and then save your changes.

Click on Writing and change the value in the size of the post box to 30, and then save your changes. This makes the input box for Posts and Pages larger and easier to use.

Click on Media and update the value in Store uploads to “wp-content/themes/AureliusWP/images”, and then save your changes. This change to the Media store uploads value ensures that any theme related uploads are stored in the theme folder and not elsewhere as in the default. It does make it easier to backup the theme and all its components, as they are all contained in the folder called AureliusWP.

Click on Permalinks, click on the custom structure button and fill in the value “%postname%”. This specifies how the name will be generated for a post or page when created.

To see what a page looks like in the AureliusWP theme, click on Pages in the dashboard and then click on View to the page. What you will see is an page with minimal styling, with sidebar content displayed to the right of the page content. The footer content shows up at the bottom of the full page. This is because there is very little CSS styling code in use from the style.css folder. BLANK is a minimal WordPress theme, set up this way to allow you to use it as a base for building your own WordPress theme.

Next time, I will look at the building blocks within the BLANK theme folder and outline what is in the theme and what they do. Stay tuned…